


The Avengers Are Bad At Communicating (But They're Learning)

by TheoMiller



Series: something bigger [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Post-TWS - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bruce has a crush, Bruce thinks Clintasha is a thing, Casual Sex, Clint Has Issues, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Gen, M/M, MAOS spoilers, Natasha Feels, Pillow & Blanket Forts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, SHIELD, That's Enough Tags, it's not, steve does art, which turns into not-casual sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-08-04
Packaged: 2018-02-11 17:10:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2076234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheoMiller/pseuds/TheoMiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Phil and Clint get their shit together, Steve helps Bucky deal with trauma, and Bruce and Natasha have a misunderstanding of epic proportions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Avengers Are Bad At Communicating (But They're Learning)

**Author's Note:**

> Panic attacks, PTSD, Bucky is not miraculously cured, SHIELD spoilers, Natasha is secretly a total softie who has no idea how to deal with silly boys.

“Should we get rid of the curtains?” Clint asked, frowning up at them.

“No,” said Natasha. “It’s better to have an environment we can change to make him more comfortable.”

He sighed. “Phil could kill three people with a curtain,” he said wistfully, rubbing his thumb against the fabric.

“As sexy as Coulson’s killing ability is,” said Natasha, “you can pine later. We’re having guests, Clint.”

“We should get a dog,” he said.

Clint was busy checking the soft pine table for nails or screws – usually they’re pegs, but you never know – and it took a minute for him to realize that Natasha had stopped dead. She was staring at him, lips parted, looking like he’d just grown a second head. Or whatever it would take to actually get a reaction out of Nat.

“What?” he asked, and checked behind himself instinctively. Nope, she was definitely looking at him. “Nat?” he said, and she shook her head as if to clear it.

“I just figured something out,” she said, “don’t worry about it.”

-

“Hello?” Banner sounded utterly bemused, probably because the people who call him tend to be the people already in his contacts list.

Natasha flopped backwards onto the bed in the loft and stared up at the slanted ceiling. “You have experience with romantic relationships,” she said.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, “I guess. Natasha? Is everything okay?”

“Clint wants to get a dog.”

There was a pause. Then, “Does Clint like dogs?”

“Clint loves dogs. But Clint doesn’t unpack his bags, not on missions, not at base, he keeps everything in his duffle so he can ship out in under ten minutes at any time. And when he wants to pet dogs, he says ‘we should go to the dog park’ or ‘can we visit the shelter?’, not ‘we should get a dog’.”

“He doesn’t like to stay in one place too long, but now he wants a dog in a permanent sort of way?” Bruce surmised. He was excellent at that ‘active listening’ bullshit they taught in sensitivity training. “That’s interesting. What brought that on?”

“He was pining, and then I told him to put his pining on hold, and he just – said he wants a dog.”

“How long has Clint been in a relationship?” Bruce asked.

Natasha paused. “Well, technically, it’s not dating. No exclusivity. But the pining started six years ago, and the sex nearly four years ago.”

Bruce sighed, the sound traveling scratchy through the speakers. “You do realize the only person I’ve ever dated was Betty, right?” he asked.

“I thought you and Stark were doing the casual sex thing post-Pepper?” she said.

“Wait,” said Bruce, “How do you know Tony and Pepper broke up? We kept it out of the papers.”

“He blew up the suits for her,” Natasha said patiently. “Stark obviously wasn’t willing to put the effort into balancing the two, and Pepper has no idea what it’s like to be on the front lines, so it was doomed. Plus, I sincerely doubt Tony’s been getting the therapy he needs to deal with what happened in New York. His panic attacks make the front page,” she added.

“Well, to answer your not-question, no, Tony and I have not been having sex. I’m fairly certain he’s pansexual, but I’ve never been anything but straight.”

Natasha grinned. “I think that makes for one straight Avenger out of six.”

“That… makes sense,” said Bruce.

“Well,” she said, “I should go make sure Barton hasn’t done anything entirely irrational.”

“Wait,” he said.

She paused, holding the phone lightly to her ear with a thumb over the end call button. “Yes?”

“It sounds like Clint has never been this – this _stable_. An instable environment is the last thing he needs. Whatever you decide, don’t, uh. Don’t jeopardize whatever it is that’s making things stable for him.”

“Dr. Banner,” Natasha said, lips twitching, “are you giving me advice based on what works for unstable radioactive isotopes?”

“…yes?” he said.

“That’s an excellent description of the relationship, actually. Thank you for your assistance, Dr. Banner.”

“Bruce,” Banner said before she could hang up.

“Bruce,” she agreed, and hung up.

-

“You remember Natasha from the bridge,” Steve said, and Clint’s hands itched for a weapon as the Winter Soldier— _Bucky_ , he corrected himself—looked at Natasha.

Barnes nodded.

Natasha said something in Russian, fluent and unemotional. She and Barnes spoke for a bit, Steve looking between them anxiously, and Clint half-expected a brawl to break out. Too much time in Russian bars, apparently.

Then Barnes turned towards Clint, who offered his hand. “Clint,” he said, and got a similar nod in reply.

“Clint was under mind control for a while two years ago,” Steve said, and Barnes flinched. “Anyway, um, grand tour?” Cap added quickly.

“This is the main room – kitchen on that side, the room to the side is a powder room, table in the middle, living room on this side, pretty self-explanatory,” Natasha said. “The loft above the kitchen is mine. The loft on the other side is Clint’s. And this,” she strode over to the door, “is the bedroom. I assume you don’t mind sharing? The main bath’s right over here, behind the ladder to Clint’s loft.”

“Can I?” Barnes asked, stabbing a finger at the ladder.

“You can check any room you want, as often as you want,” Clint said, because he knew exactly how important control over your environment was in situations like this. “Let us know if you find any threats or bugs.”

“I usually have spider-killing duty with Clint, so literal bugs are on that list as well,” Natasha added.

But Barnes jerked his head towards Steve, whose cheekbones went slightly pink. “I don’t let him kill spiders,” Steve admitted. “They don’t do any harm.”

“Oh, that is _precious_ ,” Clint said.

“Adorable,” agreed Natasha.

“We should sign him up for knitting as well as bingo, maybe he can knit rats little scarves for the wintertime.”

Barnes snorted a laugh, and Clint spread his hands. “Was that first laugh? Did I just get the first laugh? Two for two, bitches. Steve, watch and learn!”

-

The first panic attack was the worst. Steve barely managed to tackle Bucky before he could attack Natasha, and left bruises where he gripped Bucky’s limbs to hold him still until he came back to himself. Which wasn’t the acceptable response, Steve knew, but it kept him from trying to kill people, which was priority one.

Clint and Natasha left at some point while they struggled, Bucky swearing in Russian.

“James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant, 107th Infantry,” Bucky gasped out, breaking his silence, and Steve relaxed his grip a bit without letting go.

“Bucky,” he murmured, “it’s me, Bucky, it’s me.”

“Steve,” Bucky croaked out. His voice was high and breathy, on the verge of hysterical hyperventilation.

Steve felt a surge of relief and moved to cradle Bucky instead of pinning him down. “Breathe deep, can you do that?” he asked.

“Gonna be sick,” Bucky mumbled, and Steve helped him to his feet and guided him towards the bathroom. He retched until he was dry-heaving. Steve rubbed his back and held his hair away from his face and babbled about that time on Coney Island, breaking off to murmur _I’m so sorry_.

Eventually, Bucky sat back and wiped at his mouth. “Shit,” he said.

“You okay if I go get you something from the kitchen?”

“Yeah,” said Bucky. “You’re—you’re coming back?”

“I’m always gonna come back. End of the line, Buck. I’ll be back in a second.”

Bucky was slumped against the wall when Steve returned with apple juice, animal biscuits, a blanket, and his sketchbook.

“Figured we could camp out in here for a while, in case you get sick again?” Steve said, and Bucky nodded.

Natasha and Clint found them curled up together, wrapped in a blanket. Steve’s sketchbook was open to a drawing of a younger Bucky and a much smaller Steve in line at a roller coaster, and there was a faint scattering of biscuit crumbs across it.

-

“I’ll come,” Clint said sharply into the receiver on his cellphone, and Natasha watched silently from the doorway. “I’m not that much further away than you are, and if May’s not with you, you need backup.”

Natasha closed her eyes. He was talking to Coulson.

“Okay, no, FitzSimmons are not back-up,” Clint snapped.

She strode over to him and took the phone, batting his hand away when he made a grab for it. “Sir,” she said, “do you need us?”

“There was a prison break. Garrett got to the Fridge,” Coulson said, his voice curt. “I’m en route to Portland to pick up one of the escapees.”

“Phil,” she said.

“I need you to take care of this, Natasha. Clint has the coordinates.”

After a moment, she tucked her chin down, turning away from Clint, and said, “Yes, sir. Don’t get killed.”

“I won’t if you two won’t,” he said, and she sighed.

“Do you want to talk to Clint?”

“I,” he paused. “I don’t think he wants to talk to me right now.”

“That’s because you’re an idiot, sir,” Natasha said, and hung up on him.

Clint caught the phone easily when she tossed it to him.

“Steve!” she yelled, “You’re on assassin-sitting duty, Clint and I have a mission.”

-

While Clint paced the length of the suite, Natasha retreated to the bathroom and called Bruce.

“Clint’s at it again,” she said by way of introduction.

Bruce laughed. “Looking for a dog or being irrational?”

“The latter. He’s jealous, which I’ve told him is unacceptable and uncomfortably possessive, and now he’s pacing because he’s jealous and can’t do anything about it because he refuses to be the one who asks for exclusivity.”

“Why doesn’t the, uh, other involved party ask for exclusivity?”

“I honestly don’t know,” she replied, sighing. “So now I’ve locked myself in the bathroom and I’m waiting for him to stop pacing. It sets my teeth on edge.”

“That sucks,” agreed Bruce.

She picked up a bottle of shampoo. “Do people actually use hotel shampoo?” she asked.

“I did,” Bruce said, “But I tend to be an outlier.”

“What, just because you happen to turn into a – sorry, what did Stark call it? Giant green rage monster? – whenever you get angry?”

He laughed again, wry this time. “Yeah, that, uh. That tends to make me stand out. Even among the Avengers.”

“You have some moral compunction that keeps you from breaking promises, right?” Nat said, and eyed the bathtub. It might back a more comfortable perch than the toilet lid.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I do.”

“I need you to promise not to discuss these talks about Clint with Stark. He tends to be the opposite of subtle.”

“I promise,” he replied, and Natasha found that she believed him.

“Well,” she said, “what do you suggest I do?”

“Exclusivity is… well, it’s a big move. I guess you should let things settle before you try to change anything.”

She sighed. “I always hated long missions.”

“It’s not a mission,” Bruce said. “It’s love.” He sounded almost wistful.

“Love is for children,” said Natasha.

“Maybe it is. But how many of us got to actually have childhoods? I think mine was the most normal, and that’s just horrible to think about.”

“For someone whose one relationship ended with half of Harlem flattened, you know an awful lot about this,” she observed, climbing into the bathtub and stretching out. “Tell me you’re not giving me advice based on Tony and Pepper.”

His quiet chuckle crackled through the speaker. “Nah,” he said, and the silence stretched comfortably for a while. Natasha liked silence, whether it was the tense kind that came before babbled confessions or the comfortable kind she shared with Clint and Phil when they were too tired to make small talk. “Honestly, I’m going on instinct,” he said finally. “I did warn you I’d be useless.”

“The only life of my own I’ve ever known has been with SHIELD. And you saw how well SHIELD turned out.”

“The whole world saw how that turned out,” he said ruefully. “By the way, Tony says Coulson’s records vanished not long ago, but he’s got hard copies.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “He might’ve been able to do more to help than download files had he not blown up the suits,” she pointed out.

“He knows. It’s making living with him very difficult. Sorry I wasn’t around, by the way. I was setting up rudimentary quarantines in Burkina Faso, and by the time word reached me, it was too late.”

“You were supposed to be on vacation,” she accused without real heat. No-one had expected Bruce to actually _relax_ on his vacation.

“I was,” he said, “no fights, nothing. It was very cathartic.”

“NATASHA!” Clint yelled.

“And there’s my shorter mission,” Natasha said. “Talk to you next crisis, romantic or otherwise.”

“’Til the next crisis,” agreed Bruce.

-

The second flashback-induced panic attack was better. In that it was less terrible.

Bucky didn’t actually become violent, just dragged the couch and table together to form shelter and refused to be coaxed out. After a few minutes of trying, Steve went and got apple juice bottles, a laptop, and the entire bulk container of animal biscuits.

He clicked his way through Netflix – the set up was easy, really, compared to Hydra tech he’d dealt with – and opened an episode of a TV show Bruce had recommended. Bucky nibbled on the edge of a feline-shaped biscuit, and watched with a sort of detached interest until the monsters showed up, at which point he snickered. “They’re not even scary,” he said.

“You don’t watch _Doctor Who_ for the monsters,” Steve said. “You watch it for the companions.”

“I like Rose,” Bucky said.

Steve grinned. “She reminds me of you.”

Bucky tilted his head. “Don’t remember screamin’ that much when I fought Nazis,” he said.

“Just wait. Rose Tyler is incredible.”

They didn’t move for several episodes, and Steve hesitated before he played “Dalek”. Bucky made it through most of the episode, but when the Dalek reached for the sunlight, he sobbed, and Steve pulled him into his arms.

-

Clint answered the phone, ready to bitch Coulson out for going off the grid and taking on Garrett alone, because the evil un-killable mutant (since when does it take him and Nat more than a week to kill something?) could’ve totally waited until Hydra got its ass kicked, but the first sound he heard was someone’s breath hitching.

“Phil?” he said.

“Clint,” said Phil, sounding exhausted. “I just finished yelling at the Director, or I would’ve called earlier. I’m – well, actually, I’m the Director now.”

“Damn right,” Clint replied automatically.

Phil laughed, though the sound seemed to get caught in his throat. “Ward’s Hydra,” he said, and that explained why he was on the verge of tears.

The swearing streak that followed made even Nat lift her head, and she could cuss in more languages than Clint had even heard of.

“Is that bastard dead?” he asked.

“No,” Phil said. “But we sent May to take him down, so he may wish he was.”

“I love that woman,” Clint said.

“I love you,” Phil replied.

Clint nearly dropped the phone, and Natasha slipped out of the room. “What?”

“Nick and I were snarking at Garrett, and all I could think was that you would be able to say something way funnier. And the way you laugh with your hand in front of your face. And I love you, Clint, and I want this to be just us. Did—did I wait too long?” he added in a small voice.

The idea that there was any amount of time that could make Clint not want this was ridiculous, and he told Phil that.

“God,” Phil said, “I want to see you.”

Clint clutched the phone to his ear like a lifeline. “You gotta rebuild SHIELD,” he said. “Get, get your base of operations and your mission parameters set up, and then you can have free time, those’re the rules.”

“Fuck the rules,” Phil said.

“Take care of your team,” Clint told him. “I can wait for you.”

-

“He said it,” were Natasha’s opening words this time.

Bruce blinked. “He—he agreed to exclusivity?” he clarified, trying not to feel disappointed.

“Yep,” she said. “It’s like a weird, twisted fairy tale. Like the old ones. Oh! I overheard Coulson telling Clint, he’s the new Director, he’s going to rebuild SHIELD with hand-picked men.”

“Whoa,” said Bruce. He strode to his kitchen and busied himself with boiling water to make a cup of tea. Something warm and a little spicy, he thought, maybe a ginger cinnamon one.

“Yeah, I never expected to be on such good terms with the Director of SHIELD. Maybe I’ll get better missions, that’d be nice,” she sounded happy, rather than faintly amused like she generally did.

Clint made her happy. And that was enough to make Bruce’s stomach churn with guilt for the faint twinge of jealousy he felt whenever she talked about him. He hadn’t even heard her voice since they sent Loki back, not until she’d called him out of the blue to talk about how much Clint wanted to settle down and adopt a dog with her. Their communication had been limited to official channels and snapchats of Steve trying things he’d suggested.

“Well,” Bruce said, “there’s always a room here for you at Avengers Tower. And when I say room, I mean floor. Tony nearly did it in a black and red color scheme, but I convinced him to leave it neutral and let you have final design input.”

“For someone who didn’t want to join Fury’s ‘super-secret boy band’ in the first place, he’s adjusting to teammates very well,” Natasha said drily.

“He’s lonely. He just… doesn’t want to admit it,” Bruce said, and yeah, that could describe a lot of them. “Speaking of teammates, Sam’s adjusting to the Stark brand of eccentricity well. How’s the Steve situation going?”

“He just sent me a picture of Bucky passed out in what appears to be a furniture fort, with the caption ‘we marathoned Doctor Who’.”

Bruce stared at the bubbling water in the pot, trying to make sense of that. Finally, “How does that even happen?”

“I imagine Bucky had another bad day,” she said. “Last time, I said something in the tone I usually reserve for missions, and he tried to kill me. I came back to them snuggling in the powder room.”

“That’s pretty adorable,” he said, and poured some of the water into a tea cup. He went for a gingerbread tea, even though it was out of season, and settled onto a barstool while he waited for it to stew.

“Bucky’s recovering pretty fast. I mean, it’s not going to ever be like it was before, but he’s got an advantage over me. I didn’t have a life before the Red Room.”

Bruce remembered her flippant comment when they first met, _I did_ , and felt a surge of sympathy. “You have your own life now,” he said. “No SHIELD for a while. What are you going to do?”

“Figure out a way to kill my last target, and then go deal with a bunch of overly romantic boys,” she said.

“You could leave Clint with Steve and Barnes,” he said. “Go off on your own for a bit.”

“Where would I go?” she asked, and it was genuine. Like she couldn’t imagine going somewhere without an express purpose.

He shrugged before he remembered she couldn’t see him. “Well,” he said. “Uh… You could come here, oversee your floor’s design. When was the last time you had a space of your own?”

“Unless we’re counting the safehouses I have stashed all across the globe,” she said.

“We’re not.” But Bruce was grinning into his tea.

“Well, then, never. All right, I think I’ll take you up on that. I think Clint’s done on the phone, so I’m going to go find a way to kill someone all of SHIELD apparently couldn’t kill.”

-

Clint startled Bucky when he returned, and set off a bad _week_. Steve entirely missed the start of June in the haze of trying to get Bucky to eat _anything_ , and Bucky’s angry, inflamed shoulder where he’d insisted on taking off his arm so he wouldn’t hurt Clint. Bucky remained quite persuasive, even when he barely spoke three words that first day, and Steve even agreed to sleep with his mattress in front of the door.

“You can leave, you know,” he said on the second day, and Bucky stared at him. He gestured around the bedroom. “You can leave the room, or the cabin, or the state. I don’t want you to go, but I won’t make you a prisoner like they did.”

He got a nod.

The next day, he woke up to Bucky sitting in the corner and refusing to move, even to sit somewhere else or shift so Steve could get a blanket around him. So he sat a few feet away and drew Clint with huge, arching hawk wings. He got Bucky to drink a glass of apple juice, and that was all that passed his lips that day.

Steve drew Sam with falcon wings the next day, and Bucky ate four animal crackers with his glass of juice. Bucky still hadn’t moved.

The fifth day, Steve woke up with Bucky tucked against his side. He was perturbed by the fact that he’d apparently slept through someone _climbing into bed with him_ , but it was Bucky, so that quickly faded to fondness. Without brushing his hair for a few days, Bucky’s hair was wild. Steve carefully detangled Bucky’s hair before he slept for another two hours, and when he woke, Bucky was back in his corner, and the only evidence Steve hadn’t dreamed everything was Bucky’s much neater hair. Bucky let Steve touch him that day, but didn’t eat anything.

On the sixth day, Bucky ventured into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich. Then another sandwich. And a third. After five sandwiches, he sat back and blinked sleepily at Steve. “Can you draw yourself with eagle wings for me?” he asked.

“You’re a jerk,” Steve said, but went to fetch his sketchbook.

Bucky raised his voice just a little bit to call, “Punk!” after him.

-

Natasha had two color palettes that she deemed acceptable – gold and coral or silver and lavender. She also refused to combine the two, so Bruce found himself sitting at the kitchen bar on her floor and staring at the color swatches.

“Well,” he said. “If you go with coral, you can incorporate a blue to offset the warm colors. Whereas with lavender, I don’t know how many other colors you could add before it all began to clash.”

“No clue,” she said. “Coral it is. Want to go to secondhand stores to help me find furniture? I’m terrible at this.”

Bruce hesitated – New York City was still a bit of a danger area for him, at least in his own mind – but he had a feeling that it took a lot for Natasha to ask for company. So he nodded.

Tony muttered under his breath about personal shoppers when they returned with the first armfuls of throw pillows and fuzzy blankets and a tiny, framed painting of the sunrise. Next came the armchairs, which were of varying hideous shades and patterns, but were followed by the bolts of fabric for refabricating them. They had to ask for help, and the service elevator, to get the giant soft one up to her room. The kitchen chairs were an antique-looking set with scrolls and arms, all of which in desperate need of paint and refabricating, as well as the table.

The cabinets came a few days later, all dark wood with gold handles. They were of an older, farmhouse sort of style, and reminded Bruce vaguely of pictures of some distant relative’s home.

Natasha attempted to work the sewing machine, completely failed, and ordered Bruce to fix the “god-awful fabric on my comfy chairs”.

He’d taken a home ec class as an elective, because cooking’s just chemistry, and managed not to sew his fingers together. Tony came in frequently to complain in stage whispers about how they were wasting time doing things themselves instead of _the people I pay to do this stuff, c’mon guys, we could be in_ Paris _right now_!

Life at the tower for Bruce had stopped being an awkward mix of “sorry Steve’s friend killed your parents” and “sorry your relationship didn’t work out” and “wow, we were both really useless during those last few fights” and “hi Sam I’m Bruce bye now”, and Bruce got into a routine. Steve sent them both snapchats now, of art he drew (the three winged pictures had them all laughing, especially Sam, and Tony demanded one of him with “cool steampunk wings”), of Bucky’s face when he tried 21st century bananas (captioned ‘I warned him’), of Clint’s face when his attempts to teach Steve poker got him sharked (‘I was in the ARMY’), of the gigantic blanket fort they constructed from loft to loft (‘did we put down a security deposit on this place?’), of their fortune cookie fortunes… Steve really, really liked snapchat. Even more than Natasha. And Natasha had snapchatted Bruce during missions.

And then Natasha looked up from her phone and said, “I have to get back to the other boys now. Coulson’s coming to visit, Clint and I are meeting him at the airport.”

Bruce and Tony and Sam retreated to the commons area, which had armchairs but they were all the same style and white and metallic and did not include Natasha’s half-snorted giggles.

-

“Steve,” Bucky said, and Steve looked up from the cartoon he was drawing of Natasha tying the heads of a hydra – the sea monster, that is – into knots.

It was imperative to Steve that he pay the utmost attention to Bucky when he spoke on good days, because the bad days sometimes became bad _weeks_ where Bucky communicated in glares and wordless grunts when he bothered to communicate at all. “Yes?” Steve asked.

“What would you have done if I hadn’t recovered?”

Ah. This was the same question Tony had asked him, right after he’d made Steve recount every detail he remembered about Bucky’s arm. Natasha hadn’t asked him, probably because she knew the answer, knew what she would do if it were Clint, if it were her best friend in the world, because she’d lived through it.

“That wasn’t an option,” Steve said, the same thing he’d told Tony, and Bucky’s face twisted with guilt. “We told you about Loki and Clint, right?”

“Hardly comparable,” Bucky said, and pointed at Steve’s stomach. The scars gave a little twinge.

“The explosion from his arrow knocked a metal bar down on her and woke up the Hulk. By the time Thor intervened, she was frightened and bruised and battered, and that’s when the call came in, and she went to find Clint. I don’t know what happened, just that she knocked him out.”

Bucky was watching him curiously. “And?” he said.

“Natasha says it’s because she owes Clint. That there’s a life debt somewhere, one she can’t repay, but one she’ll never stop trying to repay. You’re the one who was there, when I was getting beaten to a pulp in an alleyway, when I went rushing into battle, when I had asthma attacks so bad I thought I was gonna die, when my mom died, you were there when I had nothing and no one. I don’t care if it means dying beside you, or at your hands, you know me, I really don’t care about danger, I’m never gonna leave you.”

Steve was a lot closer to Bucky now, both of them standing, which Steve hadn’t really noticed doing, but oh well. “You’re an idiot,” said Bucky. “And a punk.”

“Nah,” Steve said, with a faint smile. “I had you on the ropes.”

Bucky huffed a laugh, breathing against Steve’s lips, and the rush of warm air was followed by a mouth, and Steve grabbed Bucky’s hips and held on for dear life. “Buck…”

“I… I remember wanting this,” said Bucky. “Steve? Do you want this?”

“Anything you’re willing to give. I’ve always wanted you. You know that.”

Someone cleared their throat, and they leapt apart. Phil, Clint, and Nat were all standing in the doorway to the cabin. Phil looked strangely excited, Clint was rueful, and Nat’s mouth was twisted into a wicked grin.

Steve groaned. “You ever gonna let me live this down?”

“Not a chance,” said Natasha primly, and half-skipped past them. She paused to look at the drawing, snorted, and went to curl up on the couch. “Hey, Phil, wanna marathon _What Not to Wear_ when you’re done fanboying?”

“Yeah,” Coulson said absently.

“I’m gonna make food, you three can start your Super-Powered Geriatric Club,” Clint said.

“Hi,” Coulson blushed.

Steve held out a hand. “It’s good to see you, Coul—Phil. I hadn’t expected to meet you again. Not in this life, anyway.”

Coulson shook Steve’s hand.

“You planning on sticking around long enough for us to get to know each other?” Steve asked.

“I’m sorry,” said Coulson. “There were… well, to be honest, you were still a wild card. Fury didn’t want to risk the Avengers falling apart, and then there was the problem of Stark poking around in our files, which would’ve made a lot of very bad people very, very happy.”

“Like John Garrett,” Bucky said.

Coulson turned to face him. “Sorry, I’m a bit overwhelmed. It’s fantastic to meet you. I had your trading card, you know, I wanted to be in the Howling Commandoes as a kid.”

“They had a trading card for me?” Bucky asked, bemused. “Figured they’d all be about Stevie.”

“No! No, they had ones for all of the Commandoes. They did make them all a bit… lighter… in the drawings. But the real fans, we knew. My friends and I used to fight over who got to be Captain America, and then we’d try to be Sergeant Barnes if we couldn’t be Cap. We had a stick with a little branch shooting off that we used as a rifle.”

“Phil,” Natasha said – not unkindly – and he broke off.

He grinned sheepishly. “Anyway. SHIELD is clean now, and you’ll always have allies in us. We’d love to have either – or both – of you work with us from time to time.”

“Not full time?” Steve asked.

“No,” said Director Coulson, and he was all confident authority now, “Because I want to make the Avengers Initiative a reality. It’s my understanding that Stark has already designed and built floors for all of you, and is working on a floor for Sam Wilson. He’s still holding onto the idea that he can get away with calling it Stark Tower, but even the locals are calling it Avengers Tower now. If you’re willing, I’d like to make you the leader of the Avengers, who will function as a separate but connected organization to SHIELD.”

“I have one request,” Steve said.

“Name it,” Coulson said.

Steve smiled. “I want you to be the official liaison.”

“Deal,” Clint called from the kitchen. “Seriously, Phil, if you make me deal with Stark alone…”

Phil looked a little longingly at his boyfriend, and Steve clapped him on the shoulder. “Go on. I’ve got to finish this sketch, and Nat can explain this show to us.”

Which was how all five of them ended up crowded on the couch, watching a dark-haired woman and a man named Clinton (Clint had grumbled when Bucky laughed at that) Kelly.

Natasha’s lips twitched, but she otherwise gave no indication that she saw Steve and Bucky’s hands tangled together between their thighs. Coulson and Clint, for their part, were entirely open with their PDA – the archer was tucked against Phil’s side where he’d thrown his arm across the back of the couch, and he had his fingers laced with Phil’s in Clint’s lap. Nat was sprawled out between her boys, feet propped up on the coffee table and snickering when Coulson grumbled at the woman on the TV about professional dress.

Steve glanced at her phone after she took a picture of the five of them and typed in a caption, and all he could see was that the recipient was Bruce.

-

Bruce’s phone pinged while he was looking over the numbers on the latest wing prototypes and he picked it up to find a picture of Bucky, Steve, Natasha, Clint, and Coulson crowding their heads together, captioned “friendship is judging strangers’ fashion together”.

Tony leaned over his shoulder and said, “Ain’t that the goddamn truth. Now, come on, I wanna see about stabilization in high wind conditions.”


End file.
